Another Tailhook scandal ….

No, it’s not that Tailhook scandal which derailed the careers of many a Naval Aviator and made the Navy look really bad. No, this is the F-35C’s inability to land on a carrier like it was designed. A bit of background. The DOD wants all the service branches to use the same airframe so they came up with the JSF or Joint Strike Fighter which is the F-35 Lightening II. The A-version is going to be used by the Air Force to eventually replace the A-10, the F-16 and F-15. The B-variant is going to be used by the Marines to replace the AV-8B Harriers and their Hornets. And the F-35C is the Navy’s version.

Okay, that’s a bit more clear. Well, the F-35 has run into gobs of problems over the years as have most modern weapons systems that are under development. A case of trying to do too much and also rising costs seem to screw with the dreams of the Pentagon. See how the F-22 Raptor fleet shrunk in half. How the RAH-66 Comanche scout helicopter was axed as was the Marines’ new amphibious tank and the list goes on and on. From the Washington Post story linked to above:

The F-35 is already the most costly U.S. weapons program underway at about $385 billion. But that figure may go higher with overrun of the per-plane contract price for the 56 craft being assembled — along with the future multimillion-dollar fixes likely to be required for them — and the 15 F-35s completed but not yet delivered to the military services.

This latest problem is well, just kinda funny. I mean, a carrier based plane that can’t land on a carrier.

In the case of the F-35C, the decades-old trick doesn’t work. The tail hook is located too close to the main landing gear, so the springs supporting the arresting cable don’t have enough time to raise it after the wheels run over it for the hook to engage.

In fact, the F-35C has the shortest distance between the tail hook and the wheels among a dozen past and current aircraft deployed by the US Navy, the report says, making the CV JSF “an outlier.”

The flaw seems to be inherent to the design, and engineers simply cannot relocate the hook without a major overhaul of the construction, which is likely to be too costly for today’s cost-conscious Pentagon. At the same time, Lockheed Martin, which produces the F-35, said as early as 2007 that all variants of the vehicle were “mature and ready for production.”

The Navy Times has this to say about the matter. I like how the Lockheed guy can see lenonade out of lemons. Really, positive thinking my friend.

“The good news is that it’s fairly straight forward and isolated to the hook itself,” said Tom Burbage, Lockheed program manager for the F-35 program. “It doesn’t have secondary effects going into the rest of the airplane.”

Moreover, the rest of the design of the tailhook system, which include the doors and bay that conceal the device and other ancillary hardware, is sound, Burbage said.

“What we are trying to do is make sure that we got the actual design of the hook is optimized so that it in fact repeatedly picks up the wire as long the airplane puts itself in position to do that,” he said.

A preliminary review has already been completed and was done in conjunction with the Naval Air Systems Command and F-35 Joint Program Office.

Burbage said the hook system is already being modified in accordance with the new test data.

“We’re modifying the hook to accommodate what we found so far in test,” Burbage said. “The new parts, we expect to have them back in the next couple of months.”

Tests with the newly modified tailhook should start at Lakehurst, N.J, in the second quarter of this year, Burbage said.

So it is all good, he says. works by me. Smarter people than I seem to know about this but man, it just seems odd that a carrier-based plane would have such a problem in the first place.

Author: Andy Kravetz

Andy Kravetz has spent most of the past 16 years covering the area's legal system as well as the military. in that time, he's crawled in the mud, flown in transport planes, and written about a man prosecuted for terrorism. This blog will reflect all those interests and then some.
View all posts by Andy Kravetz

3 thoughts on “Another Tailhook scandal ….”

Some times in aeronautical engineering things look different when you go from computer models to the real world. This is why flight test is so important in flushing out all wrong assumptions that engineers made when they designed the aircraft on the computer.